Sunday, August 9, 2015

A Long Overdue Update or What the Hell Have you Been Up To, Richard?

Wow. I know. It's been a while. Work has been crazy busy. Adjudicating community theatre shows as well as reviewing other theatre productions has been full on. Life, as they say, has been getting in the way. Yet writing activity has been happening behind the scenes. Perhaps spasmodically, in fits and starts, and not as frequently as I would like (yes, Sam Seaborn, three things that all mean the same thing) but happening nonetheless.

The sixth draft of the feature script Turbulence, after an inordinate amount of time, was finally completed in mid July and sent to the director who has moved back over east. I suspect the impetus for finishing the damn script was mainly because I was flying to Melbourne to do my annual musical theatre mini-junket and feared being waterboarded if I turned up in his home state without it. We had a good catch up over dinner and the early feedback was generally very positive but with work still to be done. Notably on our third major character who has never quite gelled. More of that in a later post.

The first two episodes of the web series Boondock Alley have been completely rewritten after some interesting developments along the way and are scheduled to be shot at the end of this year. Again, I'll talk about how we arrived at this happy state after a somewhat tortuous process in a later update.

Then there's the feature project based on a true life event in 1919. There is now a third draft of a detailed beat sheet and the businessman/producer and I even had a very good meeting with a development manager at Screenwest. But progress appears to have stalled over the business side of things with the terms of an agreement to write a full treatment leading into a first draft script.

But one door slowly closes and another is possibly ajar... as they generally don't say. I have been approached by a previous collaborator about discussing ideas for a potential low budget science fiction feature. The screenwriting brain is already whirring about what this might be.

And then there was the recent epiphany. I have a spreadsheet detailing every project and its status from short film scripts to features to treatments to television ideas and incomplete episodes to, you name it. They're all my babies, even the stunted, deformed ones that were possibly hit by a brick at conception. But it's time to let the vast majority of them go and start working on new projects and ideas.

Other than Turbulence and Boondock Alley everything else now disappears into that metaphorical drawer maybe one day to be unlocked, most likely not.